Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Uncategorized

Judicial independence bites Obama

Barack Obama has just gotten a taste of what many of his presidential predecessors have had to swallow as it regards federal judicial appointments.

Their court appointments didn’t vote nearly the way their benefactor — the president — wanted them to vote.

That, I submit, speaks quite eloquently to the need to keep the federal judiciary independent.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-27/obama-goes-too-far-for-even-supreme-court-liberals

In two 9-0 rulings in recent days, the court struck down a Massachusetts law that regulated anti-abortion protesters and then it reeled in presidential appointment powers relating to recess appointments made when the Senate is not in session.

That means both of President Obama’s high court picks — Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — voted against the wishes of the man who nominated them to their dream job in the first place.

We hear yammering — mostly from the right wing of the political spectrum — that “unelected judges” wield too much power. This carping comes usually when the court rules against a cause or principle near and dear to conservatives’ hearts.

Indeed, the court has comprised many Republican appointees who’ve gone against the wishes of their presidential benefactors: Dwight Eisenhower picked Earl Warren to be chief justice and all Warren did was launch the Supreme Court on a whole range of landmark liberal court rulings, starting with the 1954 school desegregation ruling known as Brown v. the Board of Education.

Harry Blackmum (picked by Richard Nixon) wrote the Roe v. Wade abortion decision; John Paul Stevens (Gerald Ford) became a staunch liberal court member; Byron White (John Kennedy) voted “no” on Roe v. Wade; John Roberts (George W. Bush) voted with the majority to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Now two of the court’s liberal justices — Kagan and Sotomayor — have joined their fellow liberals and conservatives on the court to stick it in President Obama’s eye on a couple of key issues.

So, let’s stop the griping about the federal court system. The founders set up an independent branch of government for a reason, which was to prevent its politicization when trying to interpret the U.S. Constitution.

Uncategorized

Boehner changes mind on executive orders

It still boggles my mind that John Boehner wants to sue the president of the United States for exercising his constitutional rights as the nation’s chief executive.

That is, the president has decided to issue executive orders — imagine that — to move projects forward.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/06/25/3453244/boehner-executive-order-suit/

Why, how dare he do that, says the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Well, as it’s been reported on the link attached to this post, it was just fine for President George W. Bush to use executive authority, but not President Barack Obama.

Obama has pulled out his executive signing pen fewer times than Bush ever did. He’s done far fewer times than many of his predecessors.

But that hasn’t dissuaded the speaker from taking the president to court in what many people think now is a stunt, a sop to the tea party wing of his Republican congressional caucus.

Wait a minute. Didn’t Boehner once declare that the tea party wing wasn’t to be taken seriously? Didn’t he incur their wrath when he said that?

The wrath must have gotten to the speaker, who’s now saying that the president has failed to carry out his duties “faithfully,” whatever that means.

Today, the Supreme Court stuck it to the president when it voted 9-0 in ruling that Obama’s recess appointments were improper. I get the court’s standing in reeling in the president’s executive authority in making these appointments while Congress is in recess.

I do not quite understand what in the world has riled the speaker enough to sue the president for doing what the Constitution says he is entitled to do.

Maybe the speaker will let us all in what he has in mind … in due course.

Uncategorized

Who should be filing suit?

Shouldn’t it be taxpayers suing Congress for LACK of action, instead of Congress suing the President for doing too much?

So said David Axelrod in a tweet just a few moments ago.

Axelrod is to President Barack Obama what Karl Rove is to President George W. Bush. I guess we should call Axelrod “Obama’s Brain,” correct?

But the former White House senior policy/political adviser does make a good point about House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to sue President Obama over the president’s supposedly “excessive” use of executive authority.

Axelrod wonders why Americans aren’t suing the do-nothing Congress for sitting on its hands while President Obama is trying to push programs forward.

I get that some Americans are glad to have Congress doing nothing. They welcome the stalling, fighting, arguing, threatening and obstruction that’s been occurring in Congress.

I’m more of a good-government kind of guy, even though some folks might consider the term “good-government” be an oxymoron — kind of like “military intelligence” or “jumbo shrimp,” to borrow two of the late George Carlin’s examples.

For the speaker, though, to suggest that Obama is overreaching with his executive authority when the president has used that authority less than any of his predecessors over the past century, does seem to be a bit of an overreach in itself.

Uncategorized

Turnabout not always fair play, says GOP

Thad Cochran’s stunning reversal of fortune in Mississippi makes me laugh.

OK, so I’m just snickering under my breath. But it does create some interesting water-cooler talk among Republican Party political strategists.

Cochran, R-Miss., was supposed to lose the Mississippi GOP runoff to tea party darling Chris McDaniel on Tuesday. Instead, he won. How? Apparently by enlisting the support of African-American Democrats to vote in the Republican primary.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sen-cochrans-strategy-to-draw-black-democrats-to-polls-appears-to-have-worked/2014/06/25/74d72932-fc8a-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html

That strategy didn’t go down well with hard-core Republicans. McDaniel himself said that Cochran owed his victory to “liberal Democrats” who were afraid to face a true conservative — such as McDaniel.

It well might be that the Democrats who crossed over to back Cochran will rue the day they did so, as the incumbent six-term senator will be a heavy favorite to win a seventh term this November.

There’s a certain richness in the irony of the GOP’s complaints about Cochran’s winning formula.

Some Republican leaders — and I’ll include the GOP’s blowhard in chief, Rush Limbaugh, in this category — at one time encouraged Republicans to cross over to vote for Democrats in an effort to serve as spoiler in hotly contested Democratic primaries. That clearly was the case in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign between U.S. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. The 2008 Texas primary, for example, became notable because of the huge interest in the Democratic ballot, particularly in areas such as the Panhandle, where Democrats are nearly extinct.

Limbaugh and others were exhorting Republicans to vote for Clinton, hoping the party would nominate her in the belief she’d be easier to beat in the fall than Obama.

It didn’t work out that way, of course.

Now, though, they’re yammering about a reversal of that strategy — because, apparently, it worked.

Cry me a river.

Uncategorized

Litigious speaker going to court

Politicians and everyday Americans have griped for decades about the lawsuit-happy society we live in these days.

Well, this one just might take the cake.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner says he is going to sue President Obama because of the president’s penchant for issuing executive orders. He calls the president’s actions unconstitutional, unlawful and, by golly, he plans to take the commander in chief to court.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/25/boehners-attack-on-obamas-executive-orders-ignores-presidential-history/

But …

Is the 44th president the most executive-order-happy person ever to occupy the White House? Not by a long shot.

To date, Obama has issued 168 such orders. President George W. Bush issued 291 during his two terms; President Clinton logged 364; President Eisenhower signed 484; President Truman put his name on 907.

The all-time champ? None other than President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed 3,572 executive orders. Let’s give FDR a pass, though, given that he served three full terms and a fraction of a fourth before he died in office in April 1945.

Barack Obama has signed fewer such executive orders than any president in the past century.

Boehner, though, says he’s had enough of this executive authority business from the constitutional law professor-turned-president of the United States.

At the start of the year, Obama did declare his intention to bypass Congress to get some things done. The Constitution does give him the authority to do these things, after all. It’s just that he’s stepped on Republican goes on issues such as benefits for same-sex couples employed by the federal government and raising the minimum wage for federal contract employees.

This grandstanding by Boehner is meant to relieve pressure he’s getting from the right wing of his party.

So please, Mr. Speaker, don’t gripe in public about frivolous lawsuits. You’ve just announced your intention to file one yourself.

Uncategorized

Time for lesson on 'mainstream media'

4 Comments

Listen up, students. Professor John is going to lecture you today on the “mainstream media.”

You’ve heard the term, yes? It’s meant as an epithet. It’s said by those who think of the media as a four-letter word.

The term “mainstream media” came from the right wing of the political spectrum. I cannot cite the precise date the term surfaced, but it’s been around for some time.

MSM usually is a kind of code, students. It comes from those who want the media to think like the righties think. They see their own brand of MSM as pure. They’re the truth-tellers.

They hold, for example, Fox News as their model of truth-telling. Why? Well, Fox has an agenda. It is to undermine the “other side.” By that I refer to the president, Democrat Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in government. Watch most Fox broadcasts and you see how they continue to harp on the same so-called “scandals,” while other media turn their attention — usually — to other issues of the day.

What the righties don’t get, though, is that Fox has become as “mainstream” as the other media. Fox enjoys good ratings among news-and-commentary junkies across the nation. As the leading “conservative mainstream” outlet on cable TV, Fox has a good portion of that segment of the TV-viewing public to itself. Thus, its rating are good.

However, since Fox “covers” the news in a fashion that is suitable to those on the right, it is exempted from the pejorative label of “mainstream media.” Fox’s own talking heads even refer to other media as “mainstream,” sounding as if Fox is some outlier network seeking to be heard by a vast viewing audience.

The other so-called “truth-tellers” reside on the right. They comprise a variety of websites, online political newsletters, unabashed conservatives (of which I have no problem, if they ID themselves as such) and self-described political “watchdogs.” They, too, are exempted from the MSM label.

How about the other major networks: CNN and the broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS? They’re the bad guys, according to those on the right. Why is that? Well, they report the news — in my view — without the flair of some other media. I’ll lump the “liberal” media outlets in that category, such as MSNBC. Don’t forget PBS, the network funded by private donations and from the government. At times, even PBS gets tarred with the MSM label. How silly.

Print journalism also gets lumped into the MSM camp. Namely it’s the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two big daddies of print journalism. Throw in the Los Angeles Times and a smattering of other major metros across the nation and you’ll see them criticized because they don’t cover the news with enough ferocity to suit those on the right. My own view is that they’re doing their job, which is to report the news … period.

However, these media outlets continue to be seen by those on the right as coddling left-wing politicians. Those critics miss a fundamental point here. It is that human beings rarely recognize their own “bias.” They see it in others, but not in themselves. If a news medium does not report on issues with one’s own slant, then they’re “biased.”

With that, students, our lesson ends.

If you’re going to criticize the “mainstream media,” take care to include your own favorite news organization in that category. Chances are they’re as “mainstream” as the media you are trying to criticize.

Uncategorized

Treason? Come on, Mr. Vice President

Of all the things former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter wrote in their much-discussed essay in the Wall Street Journal, the most outrageous was this:

President Obama is deliberately seeking to take America “down a notch” before leaves office.

The essay is here. Read it for yourself.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/dick-cheney-and-liz-cheney-the-collapsing-obama-doctrine-1403046522

It amazes me in the first place that the former VP would continue to undermine an administration’s efforts to stem a serious international crisis. Cheney’s carping is outrageous and disgraceful.

To suggest, though, that the president of the United States seeks to deliberately weaken the nation that elected him twice to its highest office is go so far beyond the pale that it defies even my huge reservoir of dislike for the policies that Cheney put forward while he was in office.

The Cheneys — father and daughter — have shown us a shameful exhibition of disloyalty.

Uncategorized

That slope is slippery, Mr. President

The Vietnam Generation remembers a time when U.S. military assistance overseas went from “advisory” to engaging in bloody combat. It didn’t take terribly long for our role to change in Vietnam.

It is that memory that’s been stirred in recent days as President Obama has announced the return of U.S. advisers to Iraq to aid the Iraqi military in its fight against Sunni insurgents seeking to take back the government Americans overthrew when it went to war there in March 2003.

http://time.com/2901449/obama-iraq-isis-troops/

The president has declared categorically that the United States will not send combat troops back into Iraq. I and no doubt million of other Americans will hold him to his word on that.

I just watched an interesting segment from CNN’s series “The Sixties” that dealt with the Vietnam War. President Kennedy was killed in November 1963 and by then our advisory role in ‘Nam had grown to several thousand troops. President Johnson fairly quickly granted military requests for more troops, ratcheting up our involvement to a level where Americans were shouldering the bulk of the combat operations against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army.

By the time I arrived at Marble Mountain, just south of Da Nang, South Vietnam, in March 1969, American troops strength was at its absolute peak: 543,000 of us were deployed there. But soon the drawdown began as President Nixon implemented his “Vietnamization” program of turning the combat responsibility over to those who had the most skin in the game.

Surely, the wise men and women at the White House and perhaps even at the Pentagon will remind the current president — who was not quite 8 years old when I arrived in ‘Nam way back when — of the folly of resuming a ground combat role in Iraq.

Listen to them, Mr. President. Please.

Uncategorized

'Take the fight to terrorists'

Bet on this: President Obama’s critics will say his statement today about how the United States plans to aid Iraq in its fight against Sunni insurgents is insufficient.

They know this, how?

I’m willing to give this strategy a try.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/obama-u-s-prepared-take-targeted-action-iraq-n135621

The president today announced the deployment of 300 military advisers who will guide the Iraqi armed forces on using the weapons we’ve given them to defend their country against the insurgency that has erupted.

The United States, Obama said, is ready to launch “targeted” attacks against Sunni military positions. When those attacks occur no doubt will be kept secret.

It’s fair to ask: What in the world is the political and/or military gain sending ground troops back to Iraq? The president believes we have nothing to gain by re-entering the battlefield. Sure, we could whip the Sunnis, force them to retreat, perhaps surrender … and then what? We’d leave yet again and the Sunni fighters would emerge from their hiding places to resume the fight.

Do we want to keep a residual force there — a la South Korea and Europe? What happens when the insurgents start targeting Americans? Do we start shooting again, thus reigniting a war we thought was over?

It’s been said time and again: This crisis requires a political solution, not a military one. The war we’ve been fighting since 9/11 is as unconventional as it gets. It’s a war against terrorists who know zero boundaries. We need to employ counter-terrorism measures, which we’ve been doing with considerable effectiveness.

While we’re on this subject, allow me this additional statement about the nation’s security.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others have been yammering about the alleged “surrender” of American security to the bad guys. Have we been attacked the way we were on Sept. 11, 2001? No. Have our forces been killing and capturing terrorists? Yes. Did we exterminate the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden? Yes again.

Will this country be any safer if we send thousands of troops back into Iraq? I think not.

It’s time to force Iraqi political and military leaders to step up the fight and defend their country against those who seek to topple them. It’s their fight in their country. We can lend a hand. Our battlefield job is finished.

Uncategorized

Kettle, meet pot

Dick Cheney’s latest rant against President Barack Obama’s foreign policy brings to mind a not-too-distant past debate about another president’s foreign policy.

The former vice president’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reminds me of what Republicans said about what Democrats said about President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/dick-cheney-and-liz-cheney-the-collapsing-obama-doctrine-1403046522

Remember those bad old days?

President Bush — and, yes, Vice President Cheney — argued that the United States needed to topple Saddam Hussein. Their campaign to win congressional approval of their plan was based on a series of untruths, such as Saddam’s supposed involvement with the 9/11 attacks.

Well, some Democrats objected to us going to war in Iraq. Do you remember the Republican response? Why, if you criticize a president’s foreign policy, particularly when it involves war or potential war, you embolden the enemy, the GOP said. We must speak with one voice. Partisanship ends at the water’s edge, yes?

Yes, many Democrats were indelicate in their criticism at the time. In fact, many Republicans spoke reasonably in trying to tamp down the dissension here at home as we prepared to go to war.

Now the shoe is on the other proverbial foot. President Obama has withdrawn our troops from Iraq and is preparing to do the same in Afghanistan. Iraq is erupting into sectarian violence.

Who’s leading the criticism of a Democratic president? None other than the former Republican vice president, Richard Bruce Cheney.

His absolute lack of self-awareness, his complete amnesia on what he and other Republicans said a decade ago to similar criticism and his nonsensical defense of a policy that killed more than 4,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis is simply stunning.

I hate to think Dick Cheney has lost his mind.

However …